Assignment #8, Our

Jason Cohen(Yellow Blog), Jeffrey Hertzberg(Red Blog)

Like many of our peers, we decided that Google Groups would be the optimal place to start looking for social support groups. We found one pertaining to grief (more specifically grief over the death of loved ones) and coded it in terms of the six categories of online social support, most of which were presented by Braithwaite and one of which was not:

Information refers, rather obviously, to factual assistance or advice given as a means be of support.
Tangible Assistance refers to actual, physical help, along the lines of loaning somebody money, in contrast to the other, primarily verbal types of support.
Esteem Support is the affirmation of others through compliments.
Emotional Support is the means of supporting others via empathy, sympathy, or general affection.
Network Support is the referral of the person in need to support to others in a better position to help, be they professionals or just people with more experience.
Humor speaks for itself; laughter is the best medicine, after all.

Our interrate reliability was .2583 - we disagreed 7 times, usually over differences in opinion over semantics - a rather low rating, but none of our disagreements were very strong and we were able to reach a consensus easily.

We found a much higher instance of emotional support than any other, but it is likely that the nature of the group, which seemed not intent on having its members find ways overcome their grief, but rather on allowing them to sympathize with one another, this is not surprising. Almost every post we analyzed contained emotional support in some capacity, typically empathetic in nature, relating the experiences of the person in need of support to the person providing it.

Information (usually from personal experience) was another common factor, as was network support (typically in the form of an endorsement of that particular community and its general openness). Tangible support was rare (and the one instance we did find was debatable). Esteem support was also rare.

Interesting to note is the complete lack of humor in every post we analyzed. Although the community we surveyed dealt with grief, we still would have expected to find some lighthearted quips or jokes - it seems this particular group (or perhaps just the posts we read) was more solemn than we anticipated. I think it's also important to note that the attitude of some of the posters - as mentioned before, more focused on living with their grief than moving past it - doesn't sound all that healthy. This begs the question: can well-intentioned support still sometimes be harmful?

Threads:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.grief/browse_thread/thread/7b64cc8effe48ec2/d3495c2ef8d822f4#d3495c2ef8d822f4
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.grief/browse_thread/thread/65f5c0e8e5ca7439/d9040fcec8ea9053#d9040fcec8ea9053
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.grief/browse_thread/thread/9a538c2985bc13f8/b177ce017f6127c2#b177ce017f6127c2
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.grief/browse_thread/thread/062c6da6dc7969c9/b644b0b705e02e30#b644b0b705e02e30
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.grief/browse_thread/thread/3f397aa2aa56c546/ffd91e4be520ee21#ffd91e4be520ee21